Texas
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Quiet Evening on Barton Creek
Last week I was in Austin for a conference and on Wednesday evening I tried to capture what was left of the daylight at the end of the day for a little exploration around town. I had contemplated driving out to Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge but didn’t think I had enough time to get out there and do anything useful so I opted to head downtown to Barton Springs and Zilker Park. It was smooth sailing south down the Mo-Pac expressway until it wasn’t and then I found myself ducking off the highway and heading down the still congested Lamar Street that leads towards the west side of downtown.…
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Matagorda
Two weekends ago we drove down to the coastal town of Matagorda for Chris’ birthday weekend. He wanted to do some fishing and I wanted to go camping. We ended up camping at the Matagorda Bay Nature Park which is located mostly on the Colorado River towards the tip of the outlet into the Gulf of Mexico. Chris consulted his fishing maps for kayak trails and we found several along the road leading to the beach. Many of these areas have signs not to park next to the road, which confounded us at first, but as we drove back by we saw a small fill pad of a parking area…
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Cedar Brake Outer Loop | Dinosaur Valley State Park
Over the weekend I drove up to Fort Worth to see Patrice and Justin who are currently the Gear and Go Tour ambassadors for Backpacker magazine. You might remember them from our trip to Guadalupe National Park nearly two years ago at Thanksgiving or our first encounter with them in The Whites on the Appalachian Trail where they gave us trail magic and we met them after they had been following our journey from Georgia to Maine. Anyway those two have been traveling the country this summer giving presentations at various outdoor stores and they were stopping three times in Texas. Fort Worth was going to be the best opportunity…
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Wildness | WG Jones State Forest
Heading east down the Middle Lake Trail (not to be confused with the Middle Lake Hiking Trail), I came to the Deep Gully Trail. To the north it was another wide dirt roadway, to the south I saw a fairly well worn but slightly overgrown singletrack. Feeling adventurous I decided to try the singletrack. Worst case, if it dead ended I’d just turn around. Planted pine stood in rows, sometimes not very obvious, and other times you noticed that this was a managed forest. I’m at a loss for identifying this pea. I was thinking Centrosema or Clitoria but I really just don’t know. I saw some down by our…
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Middle Lake Explorations | WG Jones State Forest
When I arrived at Middle Lake I saw several fishermen on the south end. I spotted a park bench on the east side of the lake and had to wade through calf deep grass to get there. A path was not worn well in this direction. Lake levels were down due to the summer and drought so I put my camera back down on the bench and edged closer to the water. I looked to the north and noticed more cypress trees, deciding that it was worth going off and exploring. A berm separated the lake and the smaller pond behind it to the north. The pond was down as…
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Late Summer Hike | WG Jones State Forest
Feeling the need to get out and stretch my legs, I drove to WG Jones State Forest, which is about 25 minutes from my house. It really isn’t that far away but all of the roads to get there are minor surface roads with a lot of traffic signals and speed limits are only as high as 55 in a few places. Nonetheless, it is a nice little bit of green space surrounded by suburbia. The town of The Woodlands abuts the forest to the west and south, though the park is technically in Conroe city limits. Chris and I went and explored the north portion of the park sometime…
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Paddling Galveston Island State Park
Last weekend Chris and I drove to Galveston for a short weekend stay over the Labor Day holiday. We headed for Galveston Island State Park to kayak their paddling trails on the bay side of the park. I hadn’t even used my kayak since getting it last Christmas and Chris hadn’t taken his out in awhile either. We launched from the Jenkins Bayou trailhead, driving the truck down a narrow two-track road to the launch to drop our kayaks off before parking back up the way in the parking lot. This made it a lot easier than wheeling our kayaks down the road like we’d thought we were going to…
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Cibolo Creek
I’m trying to finish going through some photos from Memorial Day weekend when we went to the Texas Hill Country. The first part of the weekend happened to be a little rainy. One of those days we stopped by Cibolo Creek a place we’d been to before three years ago when we did a Texas road trip, camping at various state parks from the Panhandle to the Texas coast. The nature center had changed a bit since we’d visited, a new building for nature education was built and the road entrance was improved considerably. While the creek itself was flowing rather lazily at the time we went, there was evidence…
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Austin In A Day
Last Sunday I made a very quick trip over to Austin to spend the day with my friend Rosemarie. We were college friends, having met aboard the Texas Clipper II when we sailed the summer before our freshman year in college. She’s from a town just outside of Austin but now lives in California and had come to visit her family for two weeks. We met at the Treaty Oak, a tree I’d heard about but had not visited. I found it tucked between parking lots and a shopping center, so it was hard to imagine the many other oaks that used to surround this now lone oak. After spending…
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Afternoon at Lost Maples | Late Spring
Over Memorial Day weekend we headed off towards the Texas Hill Country west of San Antonio to do a little exploring. Our original intentions were to hit up Government Canyon State Natural Area since we always seemed to drive past it for other parks further west. Well, the weather decided not to play nice that weekend. Only days before we had been planning on kayaking along the Guadalupe River but a call to an outfitter and checking the river levels online revealed the river was a bit dry for running the river where we were planning. Then storms came through two days in a row causing flooding. Then there was…